THE eighteenth-century cultural movement known as the European Enlightenment contained a specifically Scottish Enlightenment which was recognized as a powerhouse of ideas in fields as diverse as philosophy, political economy, physics, chemistry, and geology. In this introductory section I shall first identify some of the luminaries (or ‘literati’) of the Scottish Enlightenment and then give a brief account of what it is that makes something an ‘Enlightenment’.
First, the people. They included the philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Reid; the political economists Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart; the historian William Robertson; the sociologists John Millar and Adam Ferguson; the jurisprudential thinkers John Erskine of Carnock and Henry Home (Lord Kames); the mathematicians Colin Maclaurin, Matthew Stewart, and Robert Simson; the physicist John Robison; the chemists William Cullen and Joseph Black; the engineer James Watt; and the geologist James Hutton. Others also could have been named, and behind those of the first rank there was a considerable hinterland of enlightened activity.
As to the question of what an Enlightenment is, I shall base my account on the answer given by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He argued that an Enlightenment has two principal features: first, the presence of people willing and able to think for themselves rather than simply accepting ideas on the authority of others; and secondly, a society that has a sufficient level of tolerance to enable its creative, independent-minded individuals to put their ideas into the public domain in relative safety, that is, without fear of retribution. Where tolerance has a sufficient foothold, high-cultural activity is likely to flourish, and to do so in respect of at least most of its disciplines.1 In eighteenth-century Scotland there were many who were willing and able to think for themselves, and the level of tolerance in the country was sufficient to enable thinkers to discuss their ideas in public with relative safety, at which moment there arose geniuses such as Hume, Smith, Reid, Black, and Hutton.
However, the concept of the Scottish Enlightenment is contested. William Robert Scott, who appears to have coined the term ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, referred to the Glasgow philosopher Francis Hutcheson as ‘the prototype of the Scottish Enlightenment, that is, the diffusion of philosophic ideas in Scotland and the encouragement of speculative tastes among the men of culture of the generation following his [Francis Hutcheson’s] own’.2 Some commentators, perhaps influenced by the idea that Hutcheson was the prototype, have held that the disciplines of the Scottish Enlightenment were moral philosophy, political economy, and history, as contrasted with others who have noted the place of mathematics and the natural sciences in the Scottish Enlightenment. But my concept of the Scottish Enlightenment does not involve a privileging of any set of disciplines, since it is defined in terms of the flourishing of creative, high-cultural activity, in whatever disciplines.3
The Scottish Enlightenment was not parochial; its participants belonged to the Republic of Letters whose citizens published their ideas, thereby conversing with thinkers from the wider European Enlightenment, from England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. Scotland’s Enlightenment not only began at around the start of the wider movement but also both nourished and was nourished by it; for the Scots read thinkers such as Montesquieu, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Voltaire, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Cesare Beccaria, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and Edward Gibbon, and almost all, if not all, of these latter figures read the Scots.
It has been held by some that the 1707 Union of Scotland and England is a major element in the explanation of how Scotland came to have an Enlightenment. The Acts of Union were indeed followed a decade or so later by the beginnings of the Scottish Enlightenment, but we should avoid the fallacy of confusing temporal sequence with causal. While the Union was probably a causal factor, it may have been of rather minor significance as compared with another, namely Scotland’s own cultural resources. In the second part I shall seek to demonstrate that Scotland had the resources necessary for an Enlightenment; their absence from some accounts enhances the view that the occurrence of the Scottish Enlightenment requires explanation in terms of something extraneous to Scotland, such as an English culture that came to shape Scotland’s after the Union.
My aim is not to argue for the proposition that there was a seventeenth-century Enlightenment in Scotland—for by modern standards seventeenth-century Scotland, like all countries in Europe during that century, was grievously intolerant. Instead, my proposition is that Scotland of the pre-Enlightenment period had many significant intellectual achievements to its name, and that these achievements make the Enlightenment far less surprising than it would have been had it arisen after a period of intellectual poverty.
Following the discussion of the intellectual life of pre-Enlightenment Scotland in the second part, the third part contains a brief account of some of the writings that emanated from the Scottish Enlightenment itself. Finally, in the fourth part I raise the question of when the Scottish Enlightenment ended.
During the three centuries that preceded the Union, Scotland had more than its fair share of intellectually strong scholars. They had a natural home in the Church and the universities, operated at the cutting-edge of research, and published works that were widely recognized as of the highest intellectual level. They taught in the Scottish universities, of which three were founded during the fifteenth century, in St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and they were also prominent among the teaching staff in universities of Continental Europe. During the pre-Reformation period Scotland’s line-up of formidable scholars included John Mair (c.1467–1550), from the farm town of Gleghornie near Haddington. He rose to be Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris, then became Principal of Glasgow University (1518–23), and spent his last sixteen years as Provost of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews. Amongst those who were students at Paris while he was teaching there were Ignatius Loyola, John Calvin, Francisco de Vitoria, George Buchanan, and François Rabelais, and it is probable that all of them attended his lectures. His circle of Scottish friends included George Lokert, who was Rector of St Andrews University and Dean of Glasgow after many years teaching Arts at Paris; the moralist and logician William Manderston, who likewise was Rector of St Andrews; and Robert Galbraith, who became a senator of the College of Justice at Edinburgh after years spent as Professor of Roman Law at Paris.4
During the century and a half between the Reformation and the Enlightenment the intellectual productivity of Scotland gathered momentum. Duncan Liddel (1561–1613) from Aberdeen was a mathematician and astronomer who studied at Frankfurt under the Scot John Craig (later James VI’s physician), and then moved to Rostock, where he expounded Copernicus’s theories to leading German astronomers. Liddel endowed the first Chair of Mathematics at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1613. The astronomer Thomas Seget of Seton knew both Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, and indeed gave a copy of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius to Kepler, who had not till then known Galileo’s work. Kepler and Seget worked conjointly on their astronomical investigations. The mathematician John Wedderburn (1583–c.1645) from Dundee, a friend of Kepler, produced mathematical support for Galileo when the latter came under attack from Martin Horky. John Napier (1550–1617) from Merchiston, near Edinburgh, invented logarithms. His book Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (Description of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms, 1614) was transformative for mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers, and his invention of the slide-rule was likewise a boon for scientists. James Gregory (1638–1675) from Aberdeenshire, the first Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh, gave the initial comprehensive mathematical account of the reflecting telescope.5 His brother David Gregory (1661–1708), who was likewise Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh, taught Newtonian mechanics at Edinburgh before the teaching of it was undertaken in Newton’s home university of Cambridge. The fact that, during the century prior to the Union, chairs of mathematics were founded or refounded in St Andrews, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and in King’s College and Marischal College, Aberdeen, and that during that same period observatories were built at St Andrews, and at both King’s College and Marischal College, indicates the extent to which mathematical and astronomical studies received institutional recognition in Scotland during the period leading up to the Enlightenment.
Among the virtuosi active during the latter part of the seventeenth century was Robert Sibbald (1641–1723). From 1685 he was the first Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University and was in addition a co-founder, with Dr Andrew Balfour (1630–1694), of the Physic Garden (later the Royal Botanic Gardens) at Edinburgh, whose purpose was to provide a steady supply of herbs for the burgeoning medical school. Sibbald was also a founder, in 1681, of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Its other founders included Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713), a Professor of Medicine at Leiden before returning to Edinburgh, where he practised medicine and published treatises on his medical research.
These facts are important for an understanding of the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, for during the eighteenth century Scotland was famed for the quality of its teaching and research in medicine; and the eighteenth-century pre-eminence of the Edinburgh medical school had roots deep within seventeenth-century Scotland. Hence by the time Alexander Munro primus began lecturing on anatomy and surgery at Edinburgh in 1719, the university had long been laying the foundations for its development, during the Age of Enlightenment, into perhaps the greatest centre in Europe for medical education.
Scotland was active in other areas also. In the fields of philosophy, political theory, theology, and ecclesiology there were, among many others, the Aristotelian scholar Robert Balfour (d. c.1625); Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), who was Professor of Latin at Edinburgh and Rector of St Andrews University, and whose Lex Rex (1644) has been described as ‘the most influential Scottish work on political theory’;6 Robert Boyd of Trochrague (1579–1627), who was head of the Protestant College at Saumur and Principal of Glasgow University; Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), who authored Vindication of the Authority, Constitution, and Laws of the Church and State of Scotland (1673); and Henry Scougal (1650–1678), Professor of Divinity at King’s College, Aberdeen, and author of The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1678), a work in the genre of personal piety, which went through many editions and established itself as a classic of Protestant devotion. There were also major contributions in the field of law by Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636–1691), and James Dalrymple, first Viscount Stair, whose Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1681) is one of Scotland’s greatest legal texts.
These many achievements demonstrate that by the start of the Scottish Enlightenment the country was already operating at a high level across a wide range of academic disciplines. There is, therefore, evidence for the claim that early in the eighteenth century the country was well placed to develop an Enlightenment from within its own intellectual resources and in conjunction with the intellectual communities of Europe. At this moment something special, and unaccountable, happened—geniuses arose. The cultural space within which geniuses could arise and flourish was in place, but, as always with the emergence of such men, good fortune was also required. I am thinking of Hume, Smith, Reid, Black, Hutton, and others, whose presence in eighteenth-century Scotland ensured that it was a golden century of Scottish high culture. For one feature of geniuses who are free to put their ideas into the public domain is that they set the agenda for the thinking of others. For example, once Hume had published his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) it was difficult, almost impossible, for philosophers in Scotland, or indeed elsewhere in Europe, to write as if Hume had not existed. His sceptical theses were so powerfully argued that almost all philosophers felt the need to attend to them. Reid acknowledged the centrality of Hume for his own development, and was the central figure in one of the great philosophical schools of the Enlightenment, the Scottish school of common sense philosophy.
Continuities from the pre-Enlightenment to the Enlightenment in Scotland are to be found within both the arts and the sciences, and I shall now comment briefly on both, while indicating some prominent doctrines of the Scottish Enlightenment.7
On the arts side the continuity is well symbolized by the relation between Gershom Carmichael (1672–1729) and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746). Carmichael, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, was a student at Edinburgh, spent a year at St Andrews, and thereafter taught at Glasgow, as a regent and then, from 1727, as first occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy. Carmichael more than any other person was responsible for the introduction of the European tradition of natural law into the Scottish universities, where it flourished throughout the eighteenth century. Perhaps the three greatest natural law theorists of the seventeenth century were Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694), and John Locke (1632–1704). Carmichael studied them all, and by the 1702–3 session was lecturing on Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis (On the Duty of Man and Citizen). His commentary on it was published some years later.8
Natural-law theory investigates human nature, draws conclusions concerning what constitutes our well-functioning, and proposes morally-binding precepts that we must embody if we are to function well. Natural-law theorists have taken different views on how secular a theory of natural law should be. Grotius’s was strongly secular whereas Pufendorf’s had some religious content, though Carmichael, who paid especial attention to our duties to God, thought Pufendorf’s account inadequate in this area.
Francis Hutcheson studied moral philosophy at Glasgow at a time when Carmichael was lecturing there on natural-law theory. Hutcheson’s family were Ulster Scots, his father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers, and before entering Glasgow University in 1711 he had received his schooling in Ireland from a Glasgow graduate who had based the school syllabus on the teaching programme at Glasgow. Hutcheson must have been familiar with the Glasgow teaching of moral philosophy even before he arrived as a student. Thereafter he worked on Carmichael’s ideas, adding new elements, particularly regarding the notion of a moral sense, a receptor that enables us to draw the distinction between virtue and vice and to apply these categories appropriately, and he also emphasized more than Carmichael the role of benevolence in our moral lives. In addition he took a softer line than Carmichael on the question of the place of God in the moral dimension of our lives, and though Hutcheson held that the concept of God has a role in the moral narrative, he was not logically committed to the view that only a believer can be virtuous.
The two greatest moralists of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume and Adam Smith, were indebted to Hutcheson in various ways. Smith, a student of Hutcheson’s at Glasgow, referred affectionately to ‘the never to be forgotten Hutcheson’, and though, like Hume, Smith appears not to have accepted that moral philosophy needs to assume the existence of God, he took Hutcheson’s moral philosophy very seriously, as witness the fact that in discussing systems emphasizing the moral motive of benevolence, Smith affirmed ‘of all the patrons of this system, ancient or modern, the late Dr Hutcheson was undoubtedly, beyond all comparison, the most acute, the most distinct, the most philosophical, and what is of the greatest consequence of all, the soberest and most judicious’.9
All three philosophers, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, helped to advance the great European project of natural law, a project that is focused on the concept of human nature. Natural-law theory requires an account of human nature because our morality is a morality for humans, not for any other order of being. Hume’s greatest philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), which culminates in a theory of morality, presents a detailed account of human nature; and Thomas Reid moved in this direction also, with a detailed account of human nature preceding the exposition of a moral philosophy appropriate to his concept of human nature.10
There was general agreement among the literati that the study of human nature had to be conducted with the aid of a methodology appropriate to the natural sciences. In a word, what Hume termed ‘the science of man’11 had to be based on observation and experiment.
Reid’s work in this field led him to a set of ‘principles of common sense’, principles that cannot be proved, do not require proof, and must be presupposed if we are to prove anything. Among his principles are these. First, that we really do perform all the mental operations of which we are conscious—where ‘consciousness’ refers to our awareness of internal acts and events, such as rememberings and reasonings, and not to our awareness of external ones. Secondly, we know our past experiences by memory as we know our present mental operations by consciousness. Our memory can deceive us, but nevertheless we find ourselves, by nature, believing what memory tells us. To deny either of these principles (and many more are proposed by Reid) is to reject a principle that is part of the original constitution of our nature and through which we have characteristically human experience.
All this is ‘common sense’, something to which almost all human beings would sign up. But why say things that receive almost universal assent? It is because some philosophers were thought to have denied them. Hume was believed to have argued for a scepticism so widespread that it encompassed the external world, personal identity, objective moral standards, and God,12 and it was thought necessary to develop countervailing arguments. It is this that Reid does on the basis of his principles of common sense.
Another way to advance the science of man is to do history. Hume writes:
Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science …13
Hume’s prescription for moral philosophy calls for deployment of the kind of empirical evidence that is the substance of historical research. Nevertheless, a particular form of historical enquiry that developed in the Scottish Enlightenment was a genre that Dugald Stewart qualified as ‘conjecture’. He mentions two examples, Adam Smith’s account of the origin of language and David Hume’s of the origin of religion, and his purpose is to emphasize the fact that the two philosophers proceed as empirical scientists even though they are conjecturing about a period of human history for which there is little or no detailed evidence whether documentary or even archaeological. His thesis was that there is evidence, not direct but indirect, which permits progress on questions concerning distantly past origins.
Stewart held that on the basis of a scientific account of human nature it is possible to calculate how humans would behave in a given set of circumstances. Though the resultant historical narrative is conjecture it is scientifically well grounded, since the account of human nature on which it is based is scientific and the extrapolation from that account is a rational exercise.14 So this form of historical writing, which the Scottish Enlightenment produced in abundance, is part of natural science.
Adam Smith regards property law as a function of the state of development of society and so, as a conjectural historian, he produces an account of the social stages, indicates when property appears on the scene, and shows how laws governing it become more complex and sophisticated. The four stages, of the hunter-gatherer, herdsman, farmer, and finally citizen in a modern commercial society, are described in the Wealth of Nations and also in the lectures on jurisprudence that Smith delivered as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University.15 It is in terms of the historical realities of the commercial stage of society that Smith develops the characteristic doctrines of the Wealth of Nations, such as the importance of international free trade and the need for a relatively big government.
Some postulated a ‘state of nature’ antecedent to the social state. The postulate is investigated by Adam Ferguson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, who notes two prominent accounts of it, by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On Hobbes’s account the state of nature, lacking law-enforcement agencies and law makers, is a miserable state whose inhabitants’ lives are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’,16 a state from which people have to escape if they are to lead a full and comfortable life. Rousseau, in contrast, argues that the state of nature is a state of innocence, and that society brings corruption. Ferguson rejects both accounts because their conjectures about the state of nature are not supported by the empirical evidence. He points out that the available evidence represents people as living in society and therefore supports the conclusion that social living is natural for us. For Ferguson the state of nature is social.17
The scientific spirit of men such as Hume, Smith, and Ferguson, manifest in their study of human nature, makes them heirs of Scotland’s seventeenth-century scientific culture. I shall turn now briefly to consider the place of the natural sciences in the Scottish Enlightenment and to note a significant continuity between pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment science. Reference was made earlier to the fact that the Edinburgh medical school was pre-eminent in Europe. Among those who contributed to its reputation was William Cullen (1710–1790), a student at Glasgow University from which he graduated first as Master of Arts and then as Doctor of Medicine. He taught chemistry and medicine at Glasgow, taking up a Chair of Medicine in 1751, before transferring to Edinburgh, becoming Professor of Chemistry and eventually Professor of the Practice of Medicine there. Now known for his introduction into medicine of the term ‘neurosis’, he carried out ground-breaking researches into the nervous system and devised an influential principle for the classification of diseases.18 His four-volume work, First Lines of the Practice of Physic (1777–84), provided a detailed and comprehensive view of medical practice. It was translated into many languages and confirmed his reputation as one of the great medical teachers of the Enlightenment.
Yet more distinguished than Cullen was Joseph Black (1728–1799), who studied under Cullen at Glasgow and taught at Glasgow before taking up the Chair of Medicine and Chemistry at Edinburgh. He is now known chiefly for a series of discoveries he made in his late twenties and early thirties. Experiments on magnesia alba led him to the discovery of carbon dioxide, or ‘fixed air’, as he termed it, the first time ever that a gas was characterized by a chemical process. He then demonstrated that carbon dioxide was different from the air in the atmosphere. Next by a series of observations and experiments he discovered the phenomena of latent heat and specific heat.
Among Black’s close friends and colleagues was James Watt (1736–1819). Watt, who spent some years as Glasgow University’s mathematical instrument maker, was thinking about steam engines from the latter 1750s, a time when John Robison (1739–1805), lecturer in chemistry at Glasgow, and author of a paper (1757) on a way to improve the Newcomen steam engine, was having discussions with him on the practical applications of steam. It was in 1765 that Watt hit upon the idea of employing a separate condenser as a way of overcoming the considerable wastage of power in Newcomen’s engine. He duly patented his ‘Watt engine’, an invention that would impact on the development of the Industrial Revolution. He was involved in a vast array of engineering works, such as the survey that he did preparatory to the building, by Thomas Telford, of the Caledonian Canal between Inverness and Fort William (1801–23). Robison, who was no less interested in electricity than in steam engines, is perhaps best known today for his discovery of the inverse-square law of electrical force.
A further scientific discipline in which a major advance was made from within the Scottish Enlightenment is geology. James Hutton studied at Edinburgh University under the mathematician Colin Maclaurin, and subsequently transferred to Leiden, where he studied medicine and was awarded an MD for a thesis on the circulation of the blood. It was, however, for his researches into recycling on a planetary scale that he is remembered. In 1685 Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh had declared, on biblical grounds, that the world was created at the start of the night preceding the twenty-third day of October in the year 4004 BC. But Hutton seems early to have become convinced both that rocks on the Earth’s surface are formed from particles from earlier bodies and also that forces of erosion are a permanent feature of the surface of the planet. He identified five stages in the recycling process, and argued that the surface of the planet is the effect of an endlessly dynamic process, whose products include minerals embedded in other minerals, and fossilized sea creatures on tops of mountains. This led him to the conclusion that ‘with respect to human observation, this world has neither a beginning nor an end’.19 Hutton’s ‘theory of the earth’ was demonstrated in the course of geological field trips, often undertaken with friends such as John Clerk of Eldin and John’s brother George Clerk Maxwell. No geologist thereafter could ignore Hutton’s findings.
His theory was attacked by some members of the Kirk, but others were not disturbed by the theory’s implications for religion. The Kirk was not monolithic and while part of it was hostile to aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment, another part, the ‘moderate party’, was not. At the start of the Scottish Enlightenment proto-moderates fought hard to square intellectual demands with Church doctrine, and within a short period three professors at Glasgow University, Francis Hutcheson, William Leechman, and John Simson, faced Kirk opposition. Hutcheson was criticized because of his doctrines that we are naturally benevolent and that a person can be virtuous even if he does not believe in God; Leechman was charged with heresy (though his reputation survived intact and indeed he was later appointed principal of the university); and Simson, who taught that the Christian revelation has to be able to pass the test of rationality, faced an ecclesiastical court that forbade him to teach though he was allowed to retain his academic chair. These men demonstrated that Christian values and Enlightenment values were not incompatible, and though the writings of Hume on religion, principally The Natural History of Religion (1757) and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), provide room for dispute as to whether he was an atheist, a deist, a sceptic, or at least a non-Christian, Hume was the exception. Most of the literati were dedicated Calvinists.
This last point is pertinent to the question of whether there was anything Scottish about the Scottish Enlightenment. In reply it is helpful to compare Scotland and France, for many think, or thought, that the French Enlightenment was the great manifestation of Enlightenment values. The character of the movement was certainly different in the two countries. Two differences may be observed. First, though some of the leading literati were not professors, many were. These latter include Hutcheson, Smith, Hugh Blair, Reid, Maclaurin, Cullen, Robison, Black, Robertson, Dugald Stewart, and John Playfair. By contrast, in the French Enlightenment, no first-, second-, or even third-rank figure was a professor. France’s universities were under the control of the Catholic Church, and the Church sanctioned whatever was taught. In consequence the great lumières, the French literati, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Alembert, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach, and Lavoisier did not hold university chairs. Secondly, whereas Leechman, Blair, Reid, George Campbell, Robertson, Ferguson, and others were Calvinists and Kirk ministers, in France most of the lumières were deists, religious sceptics, or even atheists.
The literati wrote on politics, political economy, social institutions, law, religion, and education, and their thinking could not be uninfluenced by their experience, especially their experience of the great national institutions of religion, education, and the law. These institutions formed or informed the minds of those brought up in them, and since all those institutions were distinctively Scottish, the three great classes of contributors to the Scottish Enlightenment, the professors, lawyers, and preachers, were bound to reflect the institutions in their writings. The outcome was a cultural movement whose Scottishness ran deep, even as the movement produced writings of universal significance.
The term ‘Enlightenment’ has two uses, one as a name to pick out a period lasting for approximately most of the eighteenth century. The period is distinguished because of its intellectual or more broadly cultural ferment. As regards the Scottish part of the European Enlightenment, some might say that it began in the 1720s with the publication of Hutcheson’s first major works and ended perhaps in the 1790s with the death of Reid. Others would say it ended later. George Elder Davie, a noted historian of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Scottish intellectual life, dates the demise at around the 1840s.20
But ‘Enlightenment’ can also be understood as a general term to pick out a period (and there could be many such, and in many places) marked by tolerance and by the presence of people willing and able to think for themselves. On this basis there was a Scottish Enlightenment during the eighteenth century, but not a seventeenth-century version. There were enlightened people in that earlier century, but the period was marked, in Scotland as across Europe, by high levels of intolerance. But some decades after Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for blasphemy in 1697,21 the emergence of the moderate party in the Kirk was a sign of the heightened respect for the virtue of tolerance.
There is significant continuity in Scottish intellectual life from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, measured not only in terms of the survival of major players—Adam Ferguson died in 1816, James Watt in 1819, and Dugald Stewart in 1828. Some of these (as well as others of their generation) continued to be influential more or less to the end of their days. But a new generation was arising. One of the new guard was William Hamilton (1788–1856), a student at Glasgow University who, for twenty years until his death, was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh. Hamilton’s philosophy was a synthesis of the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and the idealist metaphysics of Immanuel Kant, with Hamilton supporting both philosophers in their rejection of Hume’s global scepticism, and supporting Reid rather than Kant at certain crucial points where the two philosophers were in disagreement.
Hamilton’s use of Kant is important. Hamilton was the first in a long line of significant Scottish philosophers to make extensive use of Kant’s thought. Thereafter others, such as James Frederick Ferrier, Andrew Seth (also known as Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison), Edward Caird, and R. B. Haldane, attended to German thinkers, especially Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who themselves were writing in Kant’s shadow. Some have spoken of the Germanizing of Scottish philosophy, but a major part of the German thinkers’ agenda was set by Hume’s global scepticism, and indeed Kant himself explicitly acknowledged that his philosophy was motivated in part by the need to answer Hume. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, philosophers saw Reid as presenting at least as strong a case against Hume as the German thinkers had done.
In the course of these discussions, some brilliant philosophy was published, such as Ferrier’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness, which originally appeared as a series of seven papers in Blackwood’s Magazine (1838–9), Pringle-Pattison’s The Scottish Philosophy: A Comparison of the Scottish and German Answers to Hume (1885) and his Hegelianism and Personality (1887). There were not philosophical geniuses in nineteenth-century Scotland to match Hume, Smith, and Reid in the eighteenth, but there was still a great deal of philosophy of wonderfully high quality being done. No sign here of an end to the Scottish Enlightenment, if Enlightenment be measured in terms of people thinking for themselves in a context in which they can put their ideas into the public domain without risking retribution. Furthermore, the works just mentioned, as well as many others of the period, demonstrate a commitment throughout the nineteenth century to the study of Hume, Reid, and other Scottish philosophers of the preceding century. To the end of the nineteenth century in Scotland there was a continuity of ideas at the heart of the philosophical discourse, and the discourse remained of outstandingly high quality.
Nevertheless, George Davie has argued that the Scottish Enlightenment ended in the 1840s, and that it did so mainly as a result of the adoption by Ferrier of an account of consciousness that contradicted the Scottish Enlightenment’s naturalistic thinking.22 But against Davie’s argument two points may be noted. First, there is a good deal more to philosophy than the philosophy of consciousness and a good deal more to Scottish discussion of the philosophy of consciousness than just Ferrier’s discussion. Secondly, there is a good deal more to the Scottish Enlightenment than philosophy, and in particular there is science and, as we shall observe, science of a world-beating sort is also part of the achievement of nineteenth-century Scotland.
To turn therefore to science, it may be recalled that among those who went on field trips with James Hutton was George Clerk Maxwell. His great-grandson James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was a pupil at Edinburgh Academy, and then a student at Edinburgh University, where he read logic and metaphysics under Sir William Hamilton. He also attended classes in moral philosophy, physics, and chemistry. The broad cultural formation, a characteristically Scottish education, that he received was a matter of permanent satisfaction to him. The breadth of this formation surfaced in several of his writings, including his inaugural lecture as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen (1856), and in an essay on the philosophy of action in which he argued that determinism is not supported by particle physics.
Among the greatest achievements of James Clerk Maxwell was his work on thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gases. He discovered during this work that the second law of thermodynamics (that heat generally cannot flow spontaneously from a material at a lower temperature to a material at a higher temperature) is a statistical probability but not an inviolable law. This insight of Maxwell’s, christened ‘Maxwell’s demon’ by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was a permanent worry to Kelvin as implying a statistical view of physical reality that seemed to him unacceptable, even though he did not succeed in overturning Maxwell’s argument.
Maxwell’s work on field theory likewise led to unsettling conclusions. He it was who discovered that light and electromagnetism are two different forms of the same energy. His Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) was transformative. Physics would not be the same again; relativity, as Albert Einstein later acknowledged, was implicit in Maxwell’s equations. Our modern world, its microwave ovens, electron microscopes, and television sets, are a consequence.
Lord Kelvin himself made hardly less impact in his day, and the Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867), which he wrote with Peter Guthrie Tait, Professor of Physics at Edinburgh, made as much of an impression at the time as Maxwell’s own Treatise. From Lord Kelvin’s theories there were developed the first transatlantic cable and a compass usable in boats with iron hulls. The Kelvin temperature scale, starting at θ° Kelvin, the lowest possible temperature in the universe, is now in regular use.
Much else was happening in Scottish high culture during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the overall picture is of intellectual activity at the highest level and across a wide range of disciplines. To which I wish to add that this tremendous activity was continuous with the period known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Why not conclude, therefore, that the Scottish Enlightenment did not end at approximately the end of the eighteenth century but instead continued on its way and was still in good fettle at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth?
But there is a different narrative, one proposed by Cairns Craig, namely that in the nineteenth century there arose a Scottish Enlightenment of a different kind from that of the eighteenth. What emerged was a ‘second Scottish Enlightenment’, characterized by ‘Scotland’s self-enlightenment as to the nature and development of its own history and of its own past cultural achievements, and also a self-enlightenment as to the relevance of those national traditions to the issues confronting a modern society’.24 Craig produces persuasive evidence to support his position, including the founding of the Scottish Text Society (1882) and the Scottish History Society (1886), the building of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (1885–1900), and the publication of many explicitly Scottish works such as Scottish History and Literature to the Period of the Reformation by John Merry Ross (1884). To this list (and I have mentioned only a fraction of the examples given by Craig), there could be added a significant number of philosophy books whose titles refer to Scottish philosophy, such as Ferrier’s Scottish Philosophy, the Old and the New (1856) and Pringle-Pattison’s Scottish Philosophy (1885).
The national self-awareness implicit in these titles of institutions and of books is a crucial part of the ethos of Scottish high culture during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is, however, a sign not of a new Enlightenment but of an intensification of the Scottishness that was already a feature of the Enlightenment in Scotland in the previous century. I accept Cairns Craig’s premises but not his conclusion. In a word, the Scottish Enlightenment continued into the nineteenth century with its Scottishness intact and, if anything, even more robust and more explicit. Far from the Scottish Enlightenment ceasing at the end of the eighteenth century, it had still not ceased a century later.
To this it may be added that in a way different to that so far discussed the Scottish Enlightenment may be said to have continued into and through the nineteenth century, for it was one of Scotland’s greatest invisible exports. To take brief note of two examples, ideas of the literati were taken up, developed, and became dominant in both France and America.
Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard (1763–1845), Professor of the History of Modern Philosophy at the Sorbonne, was committed to the Scottish common sense philosophy and lectured on it, especially on Reid and Dugald Stewart. Amongst those who heard Royer-Collard lecturing on the Scottish philosophy was Victor Cousin (1792–1867), who in 1815 was appointed to the academic chair vacated by Royer-Collard. Not only did Cousin use his lectures as a vehicle for the dissemination of Reid’s philosophy, but also, as Minister of Public Education, he ensured that Reid’s ideas had a significant status in philosophical education in France, a status they retained until at least the end of the nineteenth century.
In America also we find that the Scottish school of common sense philosophy played a role throughout the nineteenth century. For example, Charles Sanders Peirce embraced a version of Reidian philosophy that he termed ‘critical common-sensism’.25 Certainly there were differences, but my point here is only to indicate that Peirce’s version of the Scottish school of philosophy was written by a man familiar with, and largely in sympathy with, the earlier version.
Some varieties of American pragmatism might seem to leave little room for the common sense philosophy since they allow for the possibility of an evolutionary process at work even among our most deeply embedded beliefs, beliefs such as those the school of common sense philosophy identified as principles of common sense. William James, who subscribed to such a process, nonetheless found space in his philosophy for a role for common sense principles and he kept a close eye on the accomplishments of his Scottish philosophical predecessors.26
Today Scottish Enlightenment philosophy plays a perceptible role in America in the rich field of reformed epistemology, in which notions of warrant and testimony are developed that are conceptually and causally in close touch with the eighteenth-century school.27 This new appropriation indicates the robustness and sheer persuasiveness of the Scottish school.
There is, therefore, substantial evidence that the Scottish Enlightenment continued with its character and vigour intact throughout the nineteenth century in Scotland and also that it maintained a form of existence furth of Scotland in other national cultures that had appropriated the ideas of the eighteenth-century literati. It should be added that the sorts of reasons I have adduced for the claim that the Scottish Enlightenment continued through the nineteenth century apply no less to the period since then. Understanding the concept of enlightenment in terms of people thinking for themselves and able to publish their thoughts without fear of retribution by the intolerant, the Scottish Enlightenment is still with us. Of course things could be better, but that is not to imply that the Scottish Enlightenment has ceased. The Scottish Enlightenment should be seen as a Scottish project to enhance our exercise of the virtues of toleration and autonomous reason. Since the arrival of Scottish devolution in 1999, there have been many calls for a second Scottish Enlightenment. They are premature. The second cannot start until the first has run its course.
Allan, David, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1993).
—— Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (London, 2001).
Berry, Christopher, Social Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1997).
Broadie, Alexander, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh, 2007).
—— A History of Scottish Philosophy, rev. edn. (Edinburgh, 2010).
—— ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: An Anthology (Edinburgh, 1997).
—— ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2003).
Craig, Cairns, Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2009).
Lenman, Bruce, Enlightenment and Change: Scotland 1746–1832, 2nd rev. edn. (Edinburgh, 2009).
Phillipson, Nicholas, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London, 2010).
Wilson, David B., Seeking Nature’s Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Pennsylvania, 2009).
Withers, Charles W. J., and Wood, Paul, eds., Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment (East Linton, 2002).
Wood, Paul, ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Rochester, NY, 2000).